Tagging, also referred to as “social bookmarking” provides a way for users to help categorize items such as photos, videos, blogs, and other digital items. Tagging provides a way to assign categories to an item and can be used to help categorize an item on a computing device.
Generally, when a user tags an item, they assign a text string to the object. For example, a user may tag a particular photo with a text string “Dad” to indicate that the photo contains a picture of their father. The tag then resides in the form of metadata that is associated with that photo. Yet, tags tend to be somewhat generic text strings that make it difficult if not impossible to use the data of the tag in any other way. That is, typically, tags have a meaning to the user who assigned the tag, or perhaps to a couple of people associated with the user. But, after that, a tag's meaning and utility can become questionable.